I work in an office where people pass by on a regular basis. You can see inside of the office from the street, but the windows are slightly reflective to keep out the direct sunlight. When people walk by the window, they are magnetically drawn to look at it. Almost no one can pass without taking a glance. What are they looking at though? Are they fascinated to see me and my colleagues as we type at our computers? They are not.
What no one can resist is the opportunity to look at themselves. Even though the window is only slightly mirrored and doesn’t even give them a particularly good view of how they look, they find the opportunity to take a quick glance irresistible. Better yet, many will not only look at themselves, but while doing so, they will make a gesture or face to indicate that they were in fact not doing what they clearly were, but were rather deeply interested in the inner-workings of our office.
We use other people much like those passersby use my office window. We see them and nod in acknowledgement, but we’re actually looking at them as we would a mirror. We hold their gaze as our unconscious mind calculates what their countenance says about us. A friendly smile gives us confidence. An approving face justifies the outfit we selected that day. An askew glance might make us give ourselves a once over to see if there wasn’t something that we overlooked that morning. An avoidant glance can make us feel like we don’t exist.
Such is the mental life of the ever-me. Given how concerned it is about every aspect of our wellbeing, it should come as no surprise that it see others primarily as mirrors. It cares desperately about these others, but primarily for what they say about itself. Others put its vast computational power into overdrive as it sees every action as a reaction to itself. Of course, these vast mental resources are largely wasted because the ever-me is caught in a self-centered illusion of original sin. The fact is, these others don’t really notice us at all.
The way we use others as mirrors has many consequences. Some of these adversely affect us, the self-concerned viewer. We can experience social anxiety as the glance of the other petrifies us with fear. We can experience exhaustion as we over-calculate what their expressions are saying about us. Ironically, we may begin to lose ourselves as we constantly change our personality based on who we’re with.
Our mirror gazing causes us to harm not only ourselves, however, but also the others we use to see ourselves. Who hasn’t met a controlling parent trying to mold their child into the person they themselves could never be? What a joy is the spouse who tries to dress their partner for a big event, fearing how their partner’s outfit will reflect upon them? Who hasn’t experienced the overbearing manager who uses their power to control others in an effort to make up for the powerlessness they themselves feel?
Most importantly and most tragically for all involved in this game of mutual reflection is that we miss the opportunity to look through the window. What we fail to see through the immediacy of our own reflection is that there is an entirely other person waiting themselves to be seen. Our inability to look past ourselves and genuinely into another person’s soul robs us of moments of genuine intimacy.
Conversations between two people who primarily see themselves in what the other is saying are maddening. Every word spoken is an attempt to mold the conversation. Every word said by the other is heard as a personal slight. There are couples who have spent lifetimes convinced that their partner doesn’t understand them when they’ve never taken the opportunity themselves to look through the reflection into the other human who lives inside.
When we allow death, however, to fully enter into our lives, our reflection begins to dim. It’s difficult to fully explain, but the self begins to shrink. We begin to find ourselves less interesting. We become less obsessed and more amused about the trivial, temporary beings we ultimately are. And although this transformation has consequences of its own, it nonetheless dims ourselves enough to see the other human beings with whom we share our world.
Instead of feeling anxious when we encounter another’s gaze, we feel incredulous that another being could really care enough to judge us. Our calculators stop processing what the glance of another says about us, and begin to process what it might say about them. Rather than reinvent ourselves for every social occasion, we plod along consistently as we speak from what we know we are at our core.
Losing our self-importance isn’t always easy on us as Thanatists, but it’s nice to be able to go out into the world of others and actually hear what they’re saying. It’s nice to be able to see an expression not as a reflection of ourselves, but an outward display of what someone’s got going on inside. And as we learn to use the practices of Thanatism to open ourselves to new horizons, we can find that interacting with others no longer feels like a mutual act of self-preservation, but rather an opportunity to see inside an entirely other universe that we otherwise could never have known.